Wherein I Police Your Thoughts

Normally I cram my regular Thursday writing in to the end of my long work day and its inevitable parenting addendum (after about 5 pm). The kids are old enough now that the post-work hours no longer include helping with homework or giving them baths or whatever. Now it's more an awareness of the finitude of the active phase of my parenting life before they betray and abandon me by becoming self-sustaining, independent and productive members of society, so I make an effort to bother them for a few hours in the evenings even though they'd mostly prefer I go away so they can play Enter the Gungeon or whatever online with their friends in peace. I mean, I'm not even allowed to offer to give them baths anymore. So much has changed.

This Thursday is different, however, as my three mostly adult children are about 100 miles south of here, alone together, unescorted at the San Diego Comic-Con. This is a thing they've done for several years now. I'm happy to have them bond as brothers over the semi-regular ritual of the trip, not bothered at all that I have NEVER ONCE BEEN TO COMIC-CON MYSELF. It's totally fine, I'm really happy for them. Just like how they've been to Hawaii many times now compared to my number of times being to Hawaii, which is equal to 100% fewer times than they have gone. This divorce bullshit has really paid out for them.

Anyway, the point is they're not here to distract me from the very serious job of writing this for you. And yet somehow I managed to start at roughly the same time I would have started were they here, so at least I have some clarity on how much of my normal sleep-de-emphasizing schedule is the result of pure subconscious masochism.

I feel OK sending the boys out on their own, but these are dark times. Just last week I had to write about the darkness along the spectrum of patriotic expression and the creeping xenophobia it sometimes invites in, not even through the back door, like just leaves the garage door wide open all night and the door to the laundry room unlocked. It doesn't even have to sneak in, you just wake up in the morning and there it is on the couch, eating plain Saltines in front of the TV and being irritated about Univision as an idea.

I had a conversation with the oldest one a few weeks ago where he was starting to bitch about the psychological strain of political correctness and the constant self-policing it requires lest one incur the wrath of the self-appointed social justiciers and the capricious, seemingly arbitrary consequences they're all too ready to dole out. I've found that it's important in these instances to maintain an even tone, avoid escalation, no matter how much you want to stand up and scream "NO SON OF MINE IS GOING TO EVEN CONTEMPLATE EXHALING THIS DOGWHISTLE BULLSHIT" and then hit him with a chair. At 20, it's possible to miss the full weight of the socio-historical context of how we've arrived at where we are now and the implications of abandoning or altering course. A parent is here to provide exactly that!

I was told when I was a kid that the general trend is people are naive idealist lefties when they're young and then mature, as it were, rightward. Once one develops a financial and personal stake in the function of government and all its attendant frustrations and inefficiencies, you won't be able to help but draw back toward the political center, if not just past but to the right, as if getting to and remaining on the left is a definitive effort to steer away from a natural line of travel that is unsustainable. Or to put it another way, this whole country is way fucking overdue for an alignment check if there's this much passive drift when we're supposed to be driving forward in a straight line.

I'm finding this not to be the case. Look, I went to college three times, so you know how higher education is supposed to take "regular" kids and brainwash them into monstrous leftist goons? Well, I was three of them. I was definitely never a communist, but was I a Marxist? Probably not that either, but I can definitely say I knew enough about it to make an informed decision about which parts of it might have chosen not to dismiss out of hand.

When I had kids, my world became a lot smaller. I was a stay-at-home parent, so by that I mean I literally now towered over all the humans I was normally around in the course of a day. I'm embarrassed to say the babies became something of a preoccupation, much to the satisfied pleasure of the state of California and all its laws discouraging child neglect. Politics becomes slightly less important in normal days that contain at least two feces-related emergencies. I wouldn't say I became less liberal, but the question just became less relevant to the survival of the everyday.

As my kids have gotten older and have begun to manage their feces on their own fucking time, I've re-emerged into a world that has given us George W. Bush, the vicious racial backlash of the Obama years and now a 250-pound bag of soft tomatoes wearing a stupid red tie. Have I gotten more conservative? Fuck that. I did my first political march at 42. Engagement is the duty of every citizen. On this trajectory, by the time I'm 70 I'll be a member of the Weather Underground.

I won't even give an inch on political correctness, annoying as it can be. The events of this past two days only re-underline the reason why it showed up in the first place. We've been a racist country for a long time, let's face it. Probably the entire history of this whole thing, you know, the country that has black-people-are-three-fifths-of-a-person right in a (now politely redacted!) section of its constitution. As the assault continues against the policing of words and the public shaming for the misuses of language that belittle and dismiss, it's become clear that the introduction of political correctness is the only thing that has actually changed in this country. And that the change it engenders isn't any kind of change at all, just a superficial re-dressing without any actual redress. We have to protect political correctness not in defense of smugness or sanctimony (we have atheists and vegans and evangelical Christians, we are NEVER going to run out of either) but because political correctness is literally the only thing we have that represents a change from the past. The underlying animosity? Still there. The poisoned and poisoning xenophobia, even against people who are from here? Still there. Just buried, in the shallowest of graves, not even that far from a main road.

What I said to my oldest boy was that if you took a representative sample and listened long enough, eventually you're going to see the trendlines: the people who rail against political correctness the most are the ones who are mad they can't say the N-word in public. How many days away are we from the president of the United States just rolling it out at a rally in Arkansas or some shit? Is it really that far-fetched? And then when the lid is off, what will be the consequence? Like everything else, for him: literally nothing. But if we scratch that thin layer of anti-racist public agreement away, the new taboo that requires so much labor to keep in place, where will that leave is? Right about 1968, I reckon. It was before my time, but from what I read, that was a rough year.